


Wrapped in Piano Strings

by enigma731



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, M/M, POV Multiple, Post-Apocalypse, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-17 08:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2302517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't until Ultron puts on a show for Tony--relegates him to the role of helpless audience as Rhodey and Pepper and Fury burn--that he finally tips over the edge of madness,  resurrecting the broken corpse of a helicarrier from the depths of his salvage yard and forcefully taking the remnants of the team aboard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrapped in Piano Strings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stickley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickley/gifts).



> Warnings: referenced character death (offscreen), passive suicidal ideation
> 
> This concept is loosely inspired by Snowpiercer, although you don't need to have seen it in order to read and enjoy this fic. This story is somewhat speculative for Age of Ultron (movie) but contains no actual spoilers beyond the most basic plot concept.
> 
> Huge thanks to my secret helpers, without whom this fic would not exist. (Names to be added after reveals. ;) )

_I watched you crawl into my bed_  
 _With curses spilling from your head_  
 _You said "We're just the walking dead"_  
 _So I pulled the trigger and we floated off_  
 _Into the air_  
[(X)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iKGsvi6wm0)

Clint has always loved heights.

There was a tree outside his childhood bedroom, with a twisted trunk that looked like very thick rope, his own personal lifeline. He remembers climbing into the embrace of its branches, fighting his way upward until the chaos below seemed small, until it felt as though none of it could reach him.

Heights have always given him strength, focus, and an odd sense of stability. He’s grown from the boy who got knocked around constantly into a man who can hold his own hand-to-hand, true, but he still really only ever feels _powerful_ at a distance, where his aim and his skill can give him a real edge.

Now, sitting at the window all he can see is the thick clouds of black smoke and ash that obscure the ground, the occasional glimpse of scorched, ruined cities. Bodies lie strewn across the landscape thousands of feet below, like tiny colorful ants baking in the heat of an atmosphere supercharged by explosions, by the burning of civilization.

Clint doesn’t think he’s ever felt so small or helpless, a sudden prisoner of his own perspective.

The sound of the door to his makeshift quarters grinding open tears his attention away, back to the present. He recognizes Natasha by the sight of her gloved fingers through the crack of the stubborn door, though he hasn’t exactly expected anyone else. She looks oddly small and brittle as she shoves it the rest of the way open. This bedroom was intended for the Insight crew, once, and Clint can’t help feeling like he is a ghost inhabiting it.

Natasha tosses a handful of foil packets onto the bed before using her full body weight to pull the door closed again. “Chicken and noodles. Your lucky day.”

Clint grimaces as he rips open the freeze-dried meal and reaches for a bottle of water to pour in. “I fucking hate chicken.”

She perches on the edge of the mattress, watching him, and he can’t help noticing how sharp her cheekbones have gotten. “You didn’t used to.”

“Yeah, well,” he grumbles, sloshing the packet around a little as he waits for the food to rehydrate, “ _real_ chicken was different.”

“Fried chicken is not real chicken,” says Natasha, but he thinks he detects an edge of hunger, of longing in her gaze just the same.

Clint sighs and plucks a spoon off the shelf next to the bed, where he’s been keeping their dwindling supply of essentials. The utensil is a flimsy thing, handle bent at a thirty-degree angle, little spots of rust belying the quality of the metal. Then again, he’s pretty sure they’ll be dead of starvation before lead poisoning will ever be a concern.

“You want the first bite?” asks Clint, offering Natasha the spoon and meal packet.

She accepts, chewing and swallowing mechanically before handing it back to him. “And they say chivalry is dead.”

He shrugs. “You _did_ secure our dinner.”

“And enough for a few more days,” says Natasha.

Clint grimaces as he takes a bite, glancing at the little pile of packets on the bed. By his count, it’s been nearly two months since he last had real food, ironically at Tony’s disastrous party. His new flying fortress was once a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, but the supply rooms have been all but empty, the refrigeration offline, since Steve’s crew took it out of the sky two years ago. There were enough freeze-dried meals to feed a full crew for a few days, though, and with only five people aboard, they’ve managed to stretch the supply for considerably longer.

“You know,” says Clint, taking a few more bites before handing the packet back to Natasha, “I used to joke that this stuff could survive the apocalypse.”

She laughs darkly, finishing off her half of the meal. “Guess we’ve proven that theory.”

“This all that was left?” he asks, stacking the other packets on the shelf, along with the spoon. He’s still hungry--hungry enough to eat all the rest of the meals and then some, but he’s familiar with the art of conserving resources, acutely aware of the fact that he does not want to die.

She nods, stretching out on the bed and looking up at the ceiling. “On this level, anyway. Probably more elsewhere, but--”

“But it’s locked tight,” Clint finishes, lying down beside her and slipping an arm around her waist. It’s the only sort of comfort he can give anymore; they both know that nothing is going to turn out all right.

“The locks don’t concern me so much,” says Natasha, curling into his side. The tip of her nose is cold against his neck, and he shivers. “I saw how much damage there was to the ship. Feels like we could go down the stairs and fall out the bottom into the sky.”

Clint sighs heavily, his chest contracting for a moment at that image before he manages to push it back down. If he thinks too much, he knows he’ll panic, knows he’ll be lost entirely. “You should get some sleep.”

Natasha laughs bitterly. “Yeah, maybe I’ll wake up in a world with a future.”

* * *

Steve feels as though he’s been searching the Earth for as long as they’ve been prisoners in the sky.

It’s been almost eight weeks, by his count, since Ultron took the world. Seven since they watched Thor turned to ash at the hands of a drone, machine besting god as if this is somehow worse than a Biblical apocalypse. Six weeks since Tony barricaded himself onto the bridge of his salvaged helicarrier, since he made the rest of his team hostages in something like a last desperate stab at absolution.

Six weeks since Steve last saw Sam, grinning even in the midst of the losing battle.

_”Fifteen minutes,” he’d promised, hovering outside the burned out shell that used to be a hospital, his feet a few inches off the ground. “Just gotta check for survivors.”_

_“Fifteen minutes,” Steve had echoed, because he’d learned there was no arguing with Sam when it came to protecting civilians._

_Twelve minutes later, the hospital had been reduced to a pile of ash, and they’d been forced to flee the area ahead of the drones._

But Sam isn’t gone, he thinks, not entirely. The emergency locator beacon on his suit is still functioning, and still shows up on the screen of the tablet Steve has scavenged from an abandoned work station. The signal is still traveling around Europe, though he has no way of gauging how far that is from their current location. Tony’s made sure no one will find out where they are, especially not Ultron’s drones--and that means disabling the ‘carrier’s GPS.

The beacon could be a trap, he realizes, a clever bait designed just for him. But he doesn’t think he can afford to stop hoping, would rather die trying to find Sam than have another lifetime in safety.

Steve watches Sam’s signal move as a few more minutes slip by. He forces himself to count to ten, then presses a kiss to his fingertips before brushing them over the screen. Shutting the tablet off, he gets to his feet and takes stock: he’s down to the last few emergency ration bars he managed to dig out of a bank of storage lockers, the tablet and a few pairs of S.H.I.E.L.D. fatigues the only other possessions he’s been holding onto.

Kneeling, he reaches under the bed and pulls out the three jagged vibranium shards he’s stashed there, the remnants of his shield. He considers them for a long moment, swallows down a sudden rush of sadness at the thought of leaving them behind. Somehow, it feels like losing yet another friend, yet another presence in his life that he’s loved. There’s nothing practical about carting all the pieces with him, though; they aren’t functional, and they’ll only slow him down by occupying his hands. He chooses the sharpest of the three and shoves it into his belt, deciding that at least it might come in handy as some sort of makeshift weapon.

Decision made, he gets back to his feet and turns toward the door. It breaks off its hinges when he shoves it open, and he lets it fall to the floor. The impact sends vibrations through the hallway like shock waves from an explosion, but Steve doesn’t look back.

* * *

When Clint thinks Natasha is asleep, he gets out his bow. He does it every night, without fail, and every time she watches him in the faint glow of the battery-run digital clock that’s managed to survive somehow, obliviously still signaling the duty shifts of dead men.

She thinks, on some level, that Clint must be aware of her gaze on his back, must sense that something’s not quite right. Then again, their world’s been upside down for two months now.

During the day he keeps his bow on the shelf by the bed, along with their food supplies and the rusting utensils, the bottles of water that’s probably been recycled through the helicarrier’s system ten times over by now. As she watches, Clint runs his fingers over the splintered grip of his bow, the place where the upper limb is broken, hanging at a sharp angle like a fractured bone. One of these days it is going to fall apart entirely, Natasha thinks, and she feels a strange dread at that thought, at the hurt she knows it will cause him.

“Clint,” she says softly, when she can’t bear to watch this display in silence anymore, can’t bear to not be touching him. She watches the way his shoulders jump and tense, moves closer so that she can rest a hand on his hip.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts, shoving the ruined skeleton of his bow back onto the shelf before he turns over to face her. “I didn’t--didn’t mean to wake you.”

Natasha sighs. “For you to wake me, I’d have to be asleep first.” She can’t remember the last time she slept more than a shallow few minutes at a time. Their whole reality’s begun to feel like a horrific fever dream. She might actually have gone insane, she thinks, and she isn’t sure she’d be able to tell the difference.

“Sorry,” he repeats, as if he might somehow be responsible for all of this.

“Quiet,” says Natasha, rolling him onto his back and kissing him solidly, a little desperately. “Be quiet, just kiss me.”

Clint takes a shaky breath, like he’s trying to find air beneath the weight of the world. The skin of his fingertips is still rough as he reaches up to touch her face, and she shivers, though his hand is warm where it rests against her jaw, distinctly human.

“I love you,” she breathes, because there’s no point keeping it silent anymore, no one left alive who’s unaware of her secrets, and no guarantee of seeing another day, another chance.

He runs his free hand along her side, beneath her shirt, and she has a moment of awareness that he must be able to feel her ribs, must sense her slowly impending death as he does his own.

He doesn’t get a chance to do anything more, though, before the sound of footfalls in the hallway makes them both freeze. It’s been more than a month since they’ve seen any of the others onboard; Natasha’s not sure that anyone else is even alive. With its solar power and Tony’s algorithms, she’s pretty sure this ship could fly itself for years without any human intervention. Now, she wonders whether the drones have found them at last, whether their threadbare luck’s finally run out.

Shaking off her shock, Natasha sits up and grips the handle of the knife she keeps at her hip, the only functional weapon she has at the moment. Clint has his bow in his hands again, she realizes, though she thinks it must be on pure instinct. They both know it won’t offer any sort of protection anymore.

Natasha steadies herself as the door of their room grinds open, the sound of metal-on-metal making her skin crawl. For a moment she finds herself almost hoping that they’ve been boarded, that this will be the final answer to the question that’s been drawn by their continued existence for the past two months. But she isn’t suicidal--not quite yet--and she exhales slowly as she recognizes Steve’s silhouette in the doorway, looking solid and resolute as ever, though she knows he must be hurting as much as everyone else.

“Come on,” he says, not bothering with any other sort of greeting. “Time to go.”

“Go where?” asks Clint, and Natasha can feel him scrambling to gather up his essentials in the dark.

“The bridge,” says Steve, already turning back toward the hall. “We’re done being locked up in Tony’s vault.”

* * *

“Where are we going?” asks Clint, as he and Natasha step out into the corridor. He has a discarded t-shirt knotted into a makeshift knapsack around a small pile of supplies, as if they might be taking off on a trek through the wilderness instead of the underbelly of their ship. Then again, those things might not be so different, thinks Steve. Considering.

“You asked that already,” Steve points out. It’s dark in the hallway, the sunset long behind them, everything but the emergency reserve power out on the residential levels. They’re operating on minimal energy, he knows, though whether it’s because the systems are too damaged or because it’s one of Tony’s tactics to keep them invisible to Ultron’s drones, he isn’t sure. Steve can see all right in the gloom, courtesy of his serum-enhanced vision, but he pulls out the tablet for the benefit of his companions, setting it to emit a soft glow and handing it to Natasha, who’s remained silent thus far.

“I know,” says Clint. “I meant--You said we’re going to the bridge, but the fastest way to get there with the lifts down would be through the crawl space at the end of the hall.” He gestures over his shoulder in the opposite direction. “We’re going this way instead. So where are we going?”

“Armory,” says Steve. He supposes that Clint’s right, that he ought to have explained that before setting off with them in tow. Then again, he’s mostly making this plan up on the fly, and is far from operating at his strategic best.

“Tony’s got the place locked down, right? Doesn’t want any visitors? And who knows what else he’s cooked up in the way of defenses inside. We want to get in there, we’re going to need some supplies to help us break down some doors.”

_Tony had managed to hold it together--in a manner of speaking, anyway--for the first few days of their fight with Ultron. He’d been haunted from the beginning, obviously, had probably realized the gravity of his mistake long before the rest of them, in retrospect. But the guilt and the demons had stoked the fire behind his fight, had made him almost manic in the drive to fix things, to contain the monster he’d created._

_It hadn’t been until Ultron took the northern hemisphere, until he’d laid waste to all of the Avengers’ strongholds. It hadn’t been until he’d put on a show for Tony, relegated him to the role of helpless audience as Rhodey and Pepper and Fury burned. It hadn’t been until then that Tony had finally tipped over the edge, had resurrected the broken corpse of a helicarrier from the depths of his salvage yard and forcefully taken the remnants of the team aboard._

_“We have to get back down there,” Steve had protested, when they’d been on the helicarrier for twenty-four hours, when it had first become clear that Tony intended this to be a permanent solution an not just an interim safe house._

_“And do what?” Tony had asked, his expression still obscured behind the face plate of his suit. “Get turned into dust with the rest of the planet? We’ll be safe here. As long as we don’t stop moving, my chaos algorithm will keep Ultron from locking on. We can just--we can live here. Safe.”_

_“And who are we to stay safe when there might still be others in danger?” Steve had argued, feeling oddly as though his friends were more lost then than ever._

_“I’m not losing anyone else,” Tony had insisted, with a finality that turned Steve’s blood to ice. He’d locked the ship down then, marooned them on the residential levels before barricading himself on the bridge._

The armory is two levels down, toward the center of the ‘carrier. There are weapons lockers at the corners of most decks, but the controls are electronic, and the contents may or may not still be here anyway. Steve figures their best bet is the main hold, though the climb down the narrow metal ladders in the dark is somewhat harrowing, even for him.

“Anyone heard from Bruce?” asks Natasha, when all three of them are back on solid ground. She has her back to Steve, the tablet propped against the wall for light and the access panel open as she works on hotwiring the controls to the door. Clint stands against the wall adjacent to her, like he might be instinctively ready to cover her in a fight that won’t come.

Steve shakes his head. “Not since Stark--Not since we all split up.”

“Figures,” she says darkly, and Clint blows out a heavy breath that Steve can’t quite interpret.

“Figures why?” asks Steve, mostly because he wants to keep her talking, because conversing with his team has always been oddly comforting, has been his only solace in his most hopeless moments.

Natasha shrugs, stepping back as the wires spark under her fingers, and the big armored doors creak open, like some sort of beast awakening after a period of prolonged hibernation. “Figures that he’d hole himself up. Think we were better off a minimum safe distance from him. You’d think he might have learned how misguided that was by now, but--Well, I guess you could say we’ve all reverted to lone wolf status. Depressing how fast that happened, isn’t it?”

“Speak for yourself,” says Clint, snatching up the tablet and carrying it in front of him as he steps into the armory, contemplating a wall of weapons with something like contempt. “Too bad all they’ve got is guns and grenades.”

“Yeah,” Natasha says sardonically. “Well, HYDRA was never very original.”

* * *

It takes them a while to decide on supplies in the armory, though nothing is really preferable with their own weapons out of commission. In the end, Clint chooses two small side pieces, the closest he figures he can get to the elegance of arrows without a practical way to repair his bow or replace his lost quiver. The fleeting thought passes through his mind that the outcome of this last mission--success or failure--will likely lead to their deaths one way or another.

There isn’t going to be a road to salvation here; there isn’t going to be a return of normalcy. He is never going to have a functional bow again, he thinks, never going to feel the sensation of an arrow taking flight from between his fingers. For a moment the thought nearly overwhelms him as he stands against a large bank of windows, watching the sunrise set heavy clouds of ash aflame as Natasha works on getting the next door open. They’ve been moving forward for nearly three hours now, as far as he can tell and he’s feeling the effects of malnutrition more acutely than ever, his head swimming and his muscles weak after what once would have been only minimal exertion.

The sound of the door sliding open brings Clint back to the present, followed a moment later by the sound of Natasha’s hoarse curse.

“What?” he asks, his heart pounding in a whole new way as he goes to join her and Steve. For a moment he fears an attack--or the discovery of a body, another of their friends succumbed to the sheer hopelessness of this new world.

But it’s nothing as bad as that, he realizes--the floor of the corridor behind the door is cracked and crumbling, so damaged that in places he can see through to the deck below.

“Well,” says Steve, “that’s a problem.”

Clint can’t help it--he laughs, sarcastically at first, but it feels as if it breaks some sort of dam in his chest, and suddenly he can’t breathe anymore, can’t do anything but gasp and make half hysterical noises, his eyes stinging as hot tears run onto his face.

“Clint,” says Natasha, turning sharply away from the door and moving to his side, catching his arm with one hand and planting the other against his back, as if _he_ might be the structure that’s crumbling. “Come on. Keep it together.”

He manages, after what feels like an eternity, to regain some of his composure, to draw air into his lungs again. He swipes at his eyes angrily, feeling betrayed by his own body, by his own emotions.

“I’m fine,” he bites out. “What are we going to do?”

Natasha gives him another hard look, but she drops her hands, and he immediately feels the loss of contact like a blow. Clint forces himself to focus, though, to keep moving forward as he always has.

“Nat, you have any grappling hooks?” asks Steve, though he doesn’t exactly look hopeful.

She sighs. “One. But it’s not going to be enough for all three of us, and I’m not sure it would reach all the way to the other end. Besides, there’s another locked door at the end of that hallway. I’d need somewhere to stand to get it open, and if there’s another pit on the other side of it--”

“We’d be trapped,” Clint finishes, his stomach rolling painfully at the thought of that, though he’s still not sure how he’s deluding himself into thinking anything they do will matter all that much.

“So we can’t get across this way,” says Steve, apparently coming to the same conclusion. “Alternatives?”

Natasha considers for a moment. “It’s a question of certainty versus efficiency, right? This is the most direct route to the bridge, but we’re dependent on the walkways being intact. If we want the surest bet, then we go all the way down to the belly of the ship. Work our way across and then back up to the bridge.”

“Yesterday you told me you were afraid of falling out the bottom of the ‘carrier into the sky,” says Clint, not thinking.

She sets her jaw, her eyes cold in the feeble dawn light. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“We go with the sure bet,” Steve decides. “We don’t have enough supplies to drag this out indefinitely.”

* * *

As it turns out, they can’t descend all the way to the lowest level of the ‘carrier, because the access tubes are blocked by an avalanche of debris. The sight of the shattered walls and walkways, the powdery mountain of concrete and twisted metal bones pushing their way through turns Natasha’s stomach a little. If she’s being honest with herself, she does still feel as though the bottom could fall out from beneath their feet, as though their world could give way at any moment.

They end up on the research level, the lowest that’s still accessible. It’s dark again, because there are no windows here, though she’s lost track of the time outside, lost track of the memory of the sun. There’s damage here, too, spidery cracks in the floor, though it holds as they make their way forward.

She keeps half an eye on Clint, his earlier break making her skin crawl with anxiety, though she supposes it shouldn’t be a surprise. If anything, it’s reminded her how very close they all are to the edge, how fortunate she’s been to have him at her side for the past two months. There was a time in her life when she wouldn’t have considered a partner, wouldn’t have considered a team anything besides dead weight. Now, she can’t imagine where she’d be if she was grappling with the past few weeks in solitude.

“Stop,” says Clint, a hundred feet off from their next obstacle, the next closed door.

He puts up a hand, and she nearly runs into it, her body so firmly on autopilot as she tries to conserve her failing stamina. Her head is throbbing from the exertion of simply walking, her stomach cramping from hunger and dehydration. None of them has mentioned resting yet, though; no one is ready to consume more of their precious supplies until some sort of end is in sight.

“What is it?” she whispers, but she sees it before he can answer. There’s light spilling from beneath the door at the end of the hall, the first sign of life they’ve encountered beyond their own so far.

“I can open it like the others,” says Natasha, swallowing down her apprehension. The light doesn’t necessarily mean anything, she knows, though it’s certainly the most significant sign they’ve run across since they set off.

“We have the grenades,” says Clint, and there’s an edge in his voice that might be dark humor, though she can’t really tell. “We could blow it.”

“No,” says Steve. “As far as we know, the only other people on this ship are our own.”

“As far as we know,” Clint echoes.

“If the light is on,” says Natasha, “we could just knock.” She doesn’t give the others a chance to respond, just crosses to the door and presses the chime on the controls. She rests her hand on her gun as someone on the other side responds and it begins to slide open. The light is almost blinding, but she blinks stubbornly against it, her heart jumping as she recognizes Bruce.

For a moment he just stares at them, as though trying to decide whether they’re real. He looks thinner than anyone else in their group, pale and sweating. The left lens of his glasses is cracked, and Natasha realizes there are marks on his arms from injections he must have been giving himself.

“Bruce,” she says softly, meeting his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says finally, his voice sounding thin from disuse. “Yeah, all me today. Haven’t seen the other guy since--well, you know.”

Natasha nods, remembering Ultron’s poison, the compound that seems to have finally banished the Hulk forever, only when he’s been needed most.

“We’re going to the bridge,” says Steve, taking a step forward. “Come with us?”

Bruce hesitates for a moment, then nods. “That’s a long way, though. And I’ve got coffee. You know, the fuel of science. Why don’t you all come in and have some first.”

* * *

The coffee is instant, and out of date to boot. They drink it straight out of stainless steel mugs, the thin metal dented from impacts Clint doesn’t care to consider. The resulting drink is a sludgy mess, the kind of stuff he might have grudgingly referred to as “paint stripper” in the days before coffee became an out-of-reach luxury. The period _between_ the times in his life when coffee has been an out-of-reach luxury, he amends. Still, it’s the first hot beverage he’s had in almost longer than he can remember, and he lets his eyes slip closed in enjoyment as he swallows the first bitter, gritty sip.

He feels an unexpected wave of emotion at the familiar taste of it, the sensation of it warming the pit of his stomach. The grief, he’s learned, sneaks in at odd times, breaks through the cocoon of numbness he’s built against the world. He finds himself tempted to weep over the most mundane things: the coffee, a remembered scrap of music, the first few moments after awakening, before the awareness of everything that’s happened returns.

“Really?” asks Natasha, clearly still skeptical of his drink preferences, bemused by his reaction despite everything. She’s lounging on the floor of Banner’s lab territory, though she looks impossibly comfortable and serene as ever, as if she might be preparing for a particularly pleasurable treatment in a spa.

Clint grunts as he sits down beside her, handing her a mug of her own. Every muscle in his body is protesting the journey they’ve made so far, though it feels pathetic to admit that even to himself. It’s been two months of inactivity, two months of slowly starving to death, subsisting on the bare minimum. He remembers this feeling--the initial sharp pangs of hunger subsiding into a general fog miring his brain, an unnatural wiry heaviness in his limbs as if all his muscles might be springs stretched just a bit beyond the point of no return. He remembers it from his days on the streets as a young man, remembers it from the foster home with locks on all of the cabinets in the kitchen. It’s a familiar thing, feeling his body wasting away, though a part of him doesn’t want to admit that, doesn’t want to consider that he’s somehow ended up back at this point despite it all.

“What are you thinking?” Natasha picks up her mug and sips, manages not to grimace though he knows she’s never liked the taste of coffee, has always found it overly acidic, and this blend is especially so.

He shrugs. “I was just--” He thinks about lying, which he’s been doing a lot lately, glossing over the cracks in his own resolve because he doesn’t want her to worry, feels as though somehow he ought to still be putting up a strong facade because he loves her.

She raises an eyebrow, a simple prompt for him to continue, and a call to his bluff. Of course he hasn’t been fooling her at all, has only been consoling _himself_ with the thought that there is any way at all to shield her from the bitter helplessness of this reality.

“I was thinking that I’m tired,” says Clint. He glances over at Steve and Bruce, who are crouched over a computer display, talking in hushed tones. Something tactical, probably, but all he cares about at the moment is that they aren’t paying too much attention to him. He grabs for Natasha’s hand, and is relieved when she doesn’t pull away. “I’m-- _really_ tired, Natasha. I feel like--I feel brittle. Like an old man. Like--clay. Some shit.”

She searches his eyes for a long moment and then nods, because of course she knows this is not where his thoughts end. “And?”

He shakes his head. “And I was just wondering--If we get to the bridge, if we get to Stark, what are we going to do?”

“We take this thing to the ground,” says Natasha. “We get some supplies. We die fighting. What choice do we have?”

“We couldn’t fight him before,” says Clint, his voice barely audible. “What’s going to make it any different now? Is this an offensive, Natasha? Or is this a suicide?”

“Not a suicide,” she says sharply, though by the edge in her voice he thinks that she’s considered it too, that a part of her might doubt her own words. “Definitely not a suicide. Have you been watching what’s been going on down on the ground?”

“Watching what?” he asks, because he’s looked out of the windows in their abandoned quarters at least as often as she has, he thinks, only he isn’t sure what there’s been to _see_. Besides more destruction, that is.

“Ultron,” says Natasha. “At first, he-- _it_ \--was spreading drones out all over the globe. Taking down humanity wherever possible. But now--now most of the population’s gone, and the activity’s becoming more focused. He’s building some sort of hub, I think. It’s hard to see, but--it could give us the element of surprise. Let us get in a major blow before the drones realize any of us are still alive.”

“I don’t know,” says Clint. “I don’t know how it’ll be enough.”

“It will be different,” says Natasha, glancing over at Steve and Bruce again before draining her mug and squeezing his fingers, her own skin chilled despite the warmth of the coffee. “Before, we were fighting for everyone else. Everyone around us. Now--there’s nobody left to fight for besides each other.” She laughs bitterly. “Heroic, right?”

* * *

By the time they reach the final door to the bridge, Steve’s calculations say it’s nearly dawn again. There are no windows as they ascend, but he keeps an eye on the screen of the tablet that’s become his only companion for the past two months. He’s spent a fitful night watching the light of Sam’s beacon move about on the display, an odd spiral pattern over London, almost like the signal of a lighthouse, drawing him home through the gloom.

Unfortunately they’ve also used up the last of their meager food supplies, and despite the temporary bolstering of the coffee, he can tell that the others are wearing thin. He can’t deny that he’s tense as he watches Natasha work on the controls, her hands shaking ever so slightly though her shoulders are deceptively steady as ever.

“Can you do it?” asks Steve, when she’s been working for longer than he can stand to wonder. It feels as though time stopped a long while ago on the ‘carrier, hours bleeding into days into an amorphous but constant reminder of their approaching mortality.

She glances back at him. “Do what?”

“Open the door,” Steve prompts. He has no real reason to doubt her, but her tendency toward silence still unnerves him; he has always needed to talk to his team, to discuss things.

“Of course,” she says calmly, though he thinks the confidence is probably a bluff; he’s seen the same concern on her face the whole way through this operation as well. She punches in two more commands with a little flourish, and the final obstacle slides out of the way.

Steve holds his breath as the bridge is slowly revealed, the sunlight spilling out from the floor-to-ceiling windows blinding for a moment, his eyes stinging despite the serum’s modifications to his senses. He’s bracing himself, he realizes, for finding something terrible on the other side. He half expects to see Tony’s corpse, perished in a fit of desperation, or perhaps to discover that his friend has been replaced by Ultron.

There isn’t a catastrophe waiting, though, isn’t a trap. Instead there’s only Tony, sitting in the command chair on the bridge. He looks deathly pale, emaciated, sicker even than Bruce, and Steve finds himself wondering suddenly whether Tony’s been drinking.

He smiles at them, and there’s a darkness in it that chills Steve’s blood. “I figured you’d all be making another appearance eventually. You come to thank me?”

“We came to end this,” says Steve, setting his jaw. He’s prepared to fight if necessary, but hopes he won’t have to. The idea of harming his own team has always sickened him; if he’s being honest with himself, he still hasn’t quite recovered from the emotional blow of taking down S.H.I.E.L.D..

Tony laughs. “How? You’ve come to kill me, then? Be my guest.”

“No,” says Bruce, breaking in for the first time. “No, we came to remind you that hiding won’t fix anything. We have to get back on the ground. I’ve been running some simulations, thinking about how we could--”

“Not happening,” Tony interrupts, the finality in his voice like a heavy weight over the whole room. “No, we stay here. As long as we keep moving, my algorithm keeps us safe. They can’t find us. The minute we stop, we--I am _not_ losing anyone else.”

“Look around you,” says Steve. “The supplies are gone. We’re starving to death. Tell me that’s really better than making one last stand, holding onto our honor at the very least.”

“ _Your_ honor,” Tony says bitterly. “And I am working on the food situation. I have ideas. We can recycle--”

“No,” Bruce interrupts. “There is nothing on this ship that I am willing to eat in a recycled form. We have to go back to the ground, even temporarily. See what’s going on there. We owe it to people. _You_ owe it to people.” He sighs, takes in an equally shaky breath. “Look, I know what it’s like to be a monster.”

Tony scoffs. “Not anymore, apparently.”

“And _I_ know what it’s like to lead men into battle and lose them,” says Steve, undeterred by Tony’s insolence. “We all know, Stark. Come on. Let us help you. Let us help you make one tiny piece of it right. We’re a team, aren’t we?”

Tony pauses and looks for the barest instant as if he might be considering that, as if he might begin to yield. But he doesn’t get the chance to speak as the deck of the ship suddenly jolts beneath their feet, a deafening crash resonating through the structure. Steve thinks immediately that it’s an attack, thinks that they have been found after so long.

But then he catches sight of Natasha, who he realizes belatedly has been uncharacteristically quiet throughout this whole conversation, and has made no contribution with her legendary skills of persuasion. Steve realizes it’s because she’s bent over one of the few working computer terminals that, he sees now, is quickly becoming obscured by code.

“What did you do?” asks Steve, as the ship lurches again, and he recognizes the distinctive sound of systems shutting down along with the undeniable tug of gravity as the whole thing tilts and begins to descend toward the ground.

Natasha shrugs, her eyes fathomless across the deceptively long distance of the bridge. “Everything that flies falls eventually, right? Just helping the inevitable along.”

Tony stumbles the few steps over to the nearest console and stabs at the touchscreen a few times with an ineffective fingertip. When the thing apparently doesn’t respond, he slams a fist into it, the glass cracking as his knuckles turn bloody. “You poisoned my system. You wrote a virus to kill it. You _planned_ this.”

Steve feels his stomach flip as the helicarrier nosedives. He can’t decide how to feel about this development; on the one hand, this seems like a betrayal. On the other, he’s spent the past few weeks paralyzed by his own defeat, by his own helplessness. He thinks he probably ought to have counted on Natasha for action, should have looked to her for strategy much sooner. He trusts her with his life and beyond, after all.

“Is that true?” he asks instead, mostly because he wants to hear her response. He has absolutely no doubt that she’s done exactly what Tony says, and judging by Clint’s shocked look, he’s not the only one who hasn’t had any idea that this was coming .

“Yes,” Natasha says simply, sitting serenely at the nearest workstation. “It’s what I was made to do.” She meets Steve’s eyes evenly as some of Tony’s loose equipment begins sliding toward the low corners of the room with a sickening grind. “The rest of you should probably strap yourselves in.”

* * *

It feels as if the helicarrier descends in slow motion. Clint buckles himself into the seat closest to Natasha, regretting the fact that it’s still too far away to reach out and touch her, that this is far too public a space for her to allow herself comfort anyway.

He finds himself torn between pride in her for coming up with this plan, this last-ditch stab at salvation, and hurt over the fact that she apparently hasn’t felt the need to confide in him, to share at all. He’s known she was working on something all along, that she’s been vanishing for long stretches of the past few weeks to work on things elsewhere in the ship, unable to simply sit idly by and starve to death with everyone else. Natasha is a survivor, of course; it’s one of her defining traits and one of the first things he came to love in her. Still, he’s equally accustomed to being her partner now, to owning a piece of her trust she doesn’t allow anyone else.

The first thing that happens as the ship plummets lower is that the clouds of smoke outside the windows grow darker, more opaque, blotting out the light of the sun until finally they are so far beneath the gloom that it looks like perpetual dusk.

They are falling towards a jungle, Clint realizes, as the tops of the trees come into view. He isn’t sure what country they’re in, but he doubts there will be any human life left now regardless. Descending through the blackened sky and into the canopy, he has the absurd momentary thought that there ought to be dinosaurs around, or some other form of prehistoric life. Something that would match his bow, if it was still functional.

His thoughts are interrupted by the sudden _thunk_ of the emergency landing gear kicking in, a feature the ‘carrier is equipped to deploy even in the event of a full systems failure, and something he is sure Natasha has factored into her plan. A moment later, they’re on the ground, the impact rocking through the ship as the bridge’s glass windows shatter, glass raining down around them. An instant after that--before he’s even managed to catch his breath--there’s another series of metallic clangs that Clint recognizes as the arrival of Ultron’s drones, having finally found them now that the ship is still.

“This is it,” says Tony, his eyes haunted in the low light.

Steve unstraps his harness and gets to his feet, reaching for the gun he scavenged from the armory two days before. Clint scrambles free of his seat and moves into a defensive position as Bruce and Natasha do the same.

“Not quite,” says Natasha, setting her jaw as an explosion rocks the outside of the ship, and a drone bursts in through the broken windows.

There’s something wrong with it, though, Clint realizes. The light in its eyes is out, and its movements are uncoordinated. The thing takes two stumbling steps toward them, then collapses into an inert pile on the deck, like a large silver insect succumbing to pesticide.

“Your virus?” asks Bruce, his eyes still filled with determination, though he looks scarcely able to stand, sweat pouring down his forehead as the jungle steam begins to seep in, replacing the artificial atmosphere.

She nods. “Infected when it tried to interface with our systems. With any amount of luck, it already uploaded to their hub when the drone transmitted our location. Now it’s a waiting game again. Us or them. You can choose whether you stand and fight with me.”

Bruce holds her gaze for a long moment, then nods. She turns to Steve next, who’s already moving to into formation with her. Clint doesn’t wait for her cue, but he has to stop himself from reaching for his bow for what feels like the hundredth time as he gets into position and turns to stare down Tony.

“Oh, what the hell,” Tony says at last, standing to complete their circle.

“Gentlemen,” says Natasha, a small, lethal smile curving her lips upward as she clicks the safety off her gun, “it’s been an honor.”

Clint throws a glance over his shoulder at his teammates, and feels a strange pang of relief that at least he isn’t alone. Outside the clouds open up, hot jungle rain pouring down, washing a little of the ash from the sky.


End file.
